Whitney, My Love

I just finished Judith McNaught's "Whitney, My Love" last night and I have to say that I found the experience fairly disturbing. In its favor, the book reads as solid, if unimaginative, prose with good characterizations. It's extremely absorbing as well; I read the first three hundred pages in one sitting. However, finishing the book later that night, I was left with a sense of great insecurity and doubt about love, not the emotions that a romance novel is supposed to elicit. If as Jayne Ann Krentz famously stated, romance novels are ones in which "the answer is always yes," then "Whitney, My Love" might in fact have been ascribed to entirely the wrong genre. More than anything, it seems to dwell on the fragility of love, the instability of romantic relationships which constantly teeter on the brink of hate and lust (here seen as entirely negative). Here, the answer the characters get is not a "yes," but a perpetual "maybe."

This novel can clearly be seen to follow the genre of "oppositional romance" created most famously by Jane Austen in "Pride and Prejudice." Just like P&P, it has a male and female lead who frequently despise each other and yet are manifestly destined to be together. In P&P, the conflict between the two leads provides the main narrative thrust, culiminating in a joyous denouement in which all ambiguity and misinterpretation have been cleared away. "Whitney" seems to wish to imitate this model, and yet the book diverges from it in many significant ways. The type of emotional growth and maturity demonstrated by Darcy and Elizabeth over the course of the novel is lacking here. Whitney might hate the Duke when she originally meets him, but she apparently hates him just as much four hundred pages later when she believes him to have broken their engagement, despite intervening declarations of affection.

Both main characters of the novel are able to go for long stretches of time believing themselves deeply in love with the other and then, upon some mistaken revelation, reverse entirely and deny all previous emotion. They allow the present to cancel out all the past they have built together and that is, or at the very least should be, inexcusable in a romance novel. Here, love lacks all constancy. The characters are repeatedly quick to believe the worst of each other and to act on that misapprehension. Circumstances may align to bring those misunderstandings to a point of clarity and thus facilitate reconciliation, yet the very arbitrary nature of the resolution itself highlights the lack of trust which necessitated its implementation within the narrative.

It is almost absurd to imagine, within some post-denouement future, Darcy repudiating Elizabeth after discovering yet another abhorrent relation. Or on the contrary, Elizabeth invalidating her affection upon recieving a cold look or word from her husband. And yet, McNaught allows her leads to do just that, to erase all claims of love based on a rumor, a scrap of paper, an ill-timed letter. And, she does this not just once, but four or five times, building layers of insecurity and doubt upon what the reader is meant to envision as a marriage. For McNaught, love itself, without intervention, does not pervail or survive (particularly for the man); thus, any happy ending is automatically overshadowed by the ephemarality and romantic inauthenticity of that conclusion.

This wouldn't be quite so disturbing if McNaught wasn't percieved as one of the direct and most important literary heirs of Austen and Heyer within the genre. As the first modern writer to take up the mantle of historical regency, her conclusions seem to take on a greater weight, to speak for our era in the face of earlier generations. Yet, what she says speaks only to a cynicism and a blatant distrust of affection which, if valid, should shame us all.